Yes it causes problems in this increasingly narrow situation.
replyMassive storage that takes a month to fully read is acceptable in a wide variety of use cases. If it's cheaper than hard drives it'll get a huge amount of users.
It's notable that 'time to read/write entire device' has been creeping up for any storage device you can buy off the shelf for the past ~40 years.
replyReading a floppy disk took around 30 secs for example. A whole CD took 5 mins. My whole 1TB SSD takes 10 mins.
Interesting, this is my first time consciously thinking about this trend.
replyPerhaps the needs for read/write speed are bounded (before processor, etc. becomes the limiting factor), while more capacity is only limited by price. Or maybe increasing density of storage inherently means a tradeoff with I/O speed (AFAIK, NAND flash needs to rewrite lots of data just to make a single write? Atom-scale interactions have side effects)
A modern hard drive (36TB @ 280MB/s) can take more than a day. If you treat a bank of tapes as one device this can get even more extreme.
replyIn long term archival use cases this is less of an issue. Especially if it’s many exabytes we’re talking about, needing to be stored for decades.
replyBut I 100% agree with your main point about possibility vs productionisation.